After my visit, I spoke to Teresa Amabile, a business administration professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of “The Progress Principle,” about creativity at work, and told her I had just been to Google. “Isn’t it fantastic?” she said. Some of her former students work there, and “they feel very, very fortunate to be there,” she said. As to the broader relationship between the workplace and creativity, “there’s some evidence that great physical space enhances creativity,” she said. “The theory is that open spaces that are fun, where people want to be, facilitate idea exchange.

I’ve watched people interact at Google and you see a cross-fertilization of ideas.” That said, she added, “there isn’t a lot of research to support this. And none of this matters unless people feel they have meaningful work and are making progress at it. In over 30 years of research, I’ve found that people do their most creative work when they’re motivated by the work itself.”

Immigrant study participants can expose the limitations of “universal” theories that are based exclusively on data from small, homogenous groups, says David Rollock. And immigrants who don’t fit into established ethnic or religious categories spur scientists to refine outdated measures and methodologies. Rollock, along with APS Fellow Gilad Chen, Belinda Campos, Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa, participates in a cross-cutting theme program on immigration.